Ian Mccorquodale
Devoted son of Barbara Cartland who kept the flame of the ‘Queen of Romance’ alight after her death
IAN MCCORQUODALE, who has died aged 85, was the favourite child of the romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland and for many years her manager; after her death in 2000, he was the principal keeper of her flame, publishing The Barbara Cartland Pink Collection – 160 previously unpublished manuscripts, as books and e-books.
Ian Hamilton Mccorquodale was born on October 11 1937, the elder of Barbara Cartland’s two sons from her marriage to Hugh Mccorquodale, MC. The novelist had previously been married to Hugh’s cousin, Alexander “Sachie” Mccorquodale, the father of Raine, who would famously go on to marry Earl Spencer, father of Diana, Princess of Wales. Barbara Cartland’s divorce from Sachie in 1933 made lurid headlines, with charges and counter– charges of infidelity. But her “blissfully happy” second marriage only ended with Hugh’s death in 1963.
Ian, his half-sister Raine and his brother Glen were brought up in a five-bedroom arts-and-crafts townhouse in Mayfair until 1950, when the family moved to Camfield Place, near Hatfield, Hertfordshire, a 10-bedroom country mansion that had once been the home of Beatrix Potter.
The formidable romantic author liked men far more than women, and the preference applied to her own offspring: “I never made any nonsense of the fact that I prefer sons,” she observed. Her relationship with Raine was said to be frosty – at least until Raine’s marriage to Earl Spencer – but she adored Ian, later telling him that as a baby he looked exactly like an angel. Ian adored his mother in return: “I put Mum on a pedestal even though she was dictatorial. And I did what she said because I hated upsetting her.”
He retained happy memories of his early years: “My mother used to tell us the most wonderful tales about witches and exciting things like that.” But there were disadvantages to the role of favourite. Sent away to board aged eight, Ian attracted the attention of the bullies: “Mum liked me to have long hair down to my neck and all the boys used to call me a girl. I put up with the teasing and bullying and kept my hair long just to please her.”
Things improved at Harrow and Magdalene College, Cambridge, though mother remained the most important person in his life: “My life at Harrow and then Cambridge was rather monastic,” he recalled. “But my mother organised parties for local girls, then gave me her opinion of them when they’d gone. I wouldn’t have wanted to marry someone she didn’t like.”
After graduation, Ian joined the Mccorquodale family printing business, later moving to the British Printing Corporation, where he rose to become sales and export manager. At one point he harboured political ambitions and was shortlisted for a safe Conservative seat.
A jovial, kindly man, Ian Mccorquodale took after his easy-going father, who died when his son was 26. “I immediately became the substitute man in the house,” Mccorquodale recalled. “Mum leant on me much more and I felt very responsible for her. At dinner, which was always black tie, I would sit at one end of our long dining table while she sat at the other in full evening dress even when it was just the two of us. We ate formally with all the silverware until she was 97.’’
At first he travelled with her: “I took her to India several times and she was always mobbed by fans. We would be surrounded by nice ladies in saris saying, ‘Would you sign my book?’” The books were invariably pirated, he said, but Barbara Cartland signed them anyway.
After Mccorquodale married Anna Chisholm, a cousin of the Earl of Rosslyn, in 1970, Barbara Cartland would not have women along, so mostly travelled with Ian’s younger brother Glen. In the mid-1970s Ian gave up his job at BPC to work full-time for “Cartland Promotions”, established with Glen, though in 1981, as a side interest, he acquired Debrett’s Peerage, selling it in 1988 to the technical publishers Sterling, but continuing as chairman until 1997.
As Barbara Cartland added to what, by the time of her death, would be a collection of more than 700 novels – dictating 8,000 words of fantasy every afternoon to one of her secretaries while reclining in pink luxury on a sofa at Camfield Place – Mccorquodale looked after her rights worldwide, handled her dealings with publishers, did her historical research, got her books translated and opened new markets, even behind the Iron Curtain.
One clue to his success was his wholehearted admiration for his mother and his encyclopaedic knowledge of her life – from her work with gypsies to her career as a county councillor, her charity commitments and her devotion to vitamins and potions. Working with Barbara Cartland was not always easy, he conceded: “We had terrible rows about almost everything… but it never lasted long.”
The fact that he shared her belief in homeopathic remedies became apparent in 2019, when letters from 1989 between Barbara Cartland and the prime minister Margaret Thatcher were released. “It is incredible, with all you do, how you can still look as though you were 25,” the novelist wrote admiringly. “In case you ever feel tired, I am enclosing the very latest product, which takes oxygen to every part of the body, including the brain.” She went on to note that her son Ian, then 51, “wakes up in the morning and feels like a boy of 16”.
Mccorquodale recalled that Barbara Cartland’s step-granddaughter, Diana, Princess of Wales, came to see her several times for tea, before and after her marriage, and “Mum gave her books and vitamins to perk her up”. Of Diana, Dame Barbara said: “The only books Diana ever read were mine, and they weren’t awfully good for her.”
After their marriage, Ian and Anna Mccorquodale moved into an apartment in London, but he spent weekends in a farmhouse on the Camfield estate. When he and Anna divorced amicably in 1993, there was speculation that the strains in the relationship between mother and wife might have had something to do with it. “Mum and my former wife didn’t see eye to eye on a few things, but I didn’t worry about the arguments,’’ he told The Daily Telegraph guardedly in 2013. “When I told Mum we were divorcing she said I would soon find someone else.”
In fact, it took him the best part of a decade, and his mother was delighted with his choice. Bryony Brind, a former Royal Ballet principal dancer, 22 years his junior, recalled that when she was introduced to her prospective mother-in-law, “she liked the fact I was a dancer and told me I looked like one of her heroines.”
The couple postponed their wedding, planned for May 2000, because of Dame Barbara’s final illness. She died on the day they were due to marry, and they wed in September.
It was believed that Dame Barbara’s wealth from her writing extended to seven figures, but after her death it was revealed that there was nothing left. Ian conceded that “she did live very extravagantly.”
It was “for the money and to keep her literary heritage going” that in 2011 he embarked on a digitisation project with M-Y Books that led to 160 unpublished novels by the Queen of Romance being released.
“Barbara Cartland’s books will go on forever,” he insisted. “I would never read a book like Fifty Shades [of Grey] … that are all sex and no story. With Barbara Cartland you get no sex but love, romance and a happy ending.”
In 2002 Mccorquodale, who enjoyed country pursuits including fishing and shooting, suffered two strokes, which left him with a limp. Bryony Brind cared for him, but it was she who succumbed first, dying after a short illness in 2015, aged 55.
Ian Mccorquodale is survived by two daughters from his first marriage.